Breaking down gender roles, one role at a time.

Links of Great Interest: Just a few this week!

“You can get away with buying babies around the world as a United States citizen,” says Richard Cross, a senior special agent with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement who investigated Galindo. “It’s not a crime.”

OMG, that video is incredible. It takes something we’re all at least abstractly aware of and makes it so real. Anyone who can watch that and not care what these people have been through, and what they’re hoping kids of today and the future won’t have to go through, is by definition a much worse person than the people they hate.

I’m not sure I get the hostile response to the white girl’s experiment dressing as a Muslim. Hostility toward white people who won’t listen until they hear it from another white person, I very much get. I also get that it’s infuriating in these little experiments that the white person can at the end of the day just toss off the mask and go back to their white privilege. But I interpreted this as a teenager’s attempt to understand what a friend was going through firsthand. Am I missing something? I mean, if she was 30, I’d be more, “Really? You just now worked out that people are often shitty?” But she’s 17.

Lovenotes to Sharmeka is awesome – I’ve been trying to understand why she did what she did, and the letters have made me realize that the reason I don’t get it is that I’m not black myself. I can hear it from friends, I can read about it, I can sympathize my heart out – but I will never intuitively understand what it means to be a black woman in the US.

It’s SO interesting to see that link on the Halloween costume (which is bad) because I was seriously considering doing a write-up on Halloween costumes in general and how ridiculously hyper-sexualized they’ve become. I thought it was just me, but it seems there are a lot of people who agree with me!

Be sure to check out the 6th picture, ‘Maid In China’. (Which actually sounds like it COULD be the title of novel of an adopted Chinese girl who goes back to her birth country to learn about her past and gets a job working as… well, a maid). In this case, it’s a trashy costumes with tones of racism.

I suppose it depends on whether you see it as an attempt to understand (ie she believed her friend, and was just trying to understand better) or an attempt to verify (ie she didn’t really believe her friend before experiencing it for herself).

Well, she said in the article that she wanted to understand her friend’s experience firsthand which I interpret as wanting to understand better. That’s what I’m trying to understand – did I miss indications of dishonesty in her retelling, or are we supposed to doubt her word for some reason above and beyond? Like I said, if she was 30, I’d be more skeptical of her motives in general. But 17? Kids do a lot of silly things with good intentions because they just don’t know any better.

Like the mid-twenties heterosexual uber-Christian man who decided to play gay for a year to infiltrate that community to better understand that “lifestyle”. He is now cashing in with a book and getting heaps of praise for being so open minded. Now he’s got gay friends! He be enlightened! He gets the prejudice and how rough it is to be gay, because he was really method with his approach to acting the part and totally did not have the knowledge that he could take off his mask and return to his regular het life at any stage of the game.

While I don’t think the 17 year old testing out what happens when one wears a hijab was the best of ideas, she really is young enough to not get why that’s not a terribly good plan. That pretending for a while is actually nothing like being.

sbg: While I don’t think the 17 year old testing out what happens when one wears a hijab was the best of ideas, she really is young enough to not get why that’s not a terribly good plan. That pretending for a while is actually nothing like being.

Thank you, this is what I’m saying. While the link is definitely an example of the “Oh, so now you believe us because a One Of You said so” problem, the reaction to it seemed more in line with experiments done by adults for money or adulation, like you describe. Which I found kind of derailing. I’m not defending the experiment or the ignoring of the ways in which it’s problematic. I just feel like we’re subjecting a high school kid to the same standards we’d subject a 35 year old, and that made me flinch a little.

I thought the one about allies brings up a lot of good points. Oftentimes it seems people use the way criticism is given to dismiss the critique. This is given as a reason why people should be “sweet”, as the author put it, when explaining why something is offensive.

I don’t really think that’s a good idea. People who dismiss what you say based on nothing but your tone don’t usually want to listen to what you’re saying in the first place. If someone is sincerely trying to be a decent person they will be ashamed at their actions rather than you pointing them out; even if you do say they’re acting like a jerk. If they get angry at you for getting angry at them they aren’t really much on an ally are they?

That’s what I’m trying to understand – did I miss indications of dishonesty in her retelling … Like I said, if she was 30, I’d be more skeptical of her motives in general. But 17?

Not that I can see. I agree with you, and wonder if some of her critics might have missed her age. But I can also see how a real “understand” might look a lot like a “believe understand” after enough instances of the latter.